How to detect the BCS transition in an atomic Fermi gas ?

Yvan Castin

Yvan Castin: Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Ecole normale superieure, Paris, France
Iacopo Carusotto, BEC-INFM Research and Development Center, Trento, Italy

Several proposals have been made to detect the BCS transition in an atomic Fermi gas. Most of them are however not sensitive to the crucial feature of the BCS state, the long range order representing the coherence of atomic pairs. We present schemes allowing in principle to detect interferometrically such a long range order. These schemes constitute a generalisation to a paired Fermi gas of matter wave beating experiments performed on atomic Bose condensates.